The Angry Grammarian

by Jeffrey Barg

Anger Management

I’m not the only one who’s angry. Angry grammarians are often a subset of angry journalists—we’re angry journalists whose anger is more refined. The good news is that angry journalists have a place to call home, and a substantial number of angry grammarians have settled in.

AngryJournalist.com is a brilliantly simple concept: totally anonymous text on a page, with a box to answer the question, “Why are you angry today?” Click on the “Vent” button, and pretty soon the site chronicles all the anger in the world produced by journalists. There’s a lot of it.

Since premiering just two and a half weeks ago, the site has racked up nearly a thousand angry journalists, many of them angry about grammar.

“Students who graduate from high school with a 3.98 (unweighted) average cannot spell, punctuate or make verbs agree with subjects,” cries Angry Journalist No. 83.

“People who insist on using z when if they are working in NZ should use s. Use NZ English please … ” says Angry Journalist No. 87. (I don’t actually know what that means, but it sure sounds grammatical.)

No. 796: “Gerunds.”

Even the ones that aren’t grammatical bitches make for good reading: “Because our publisher has a mullet. And because our managing editor is an alky.” (No. 864)

“I get angry when my managing editor says I’ve ‘birthed’ things.” (No. 399)

“Sources who expect me to sleep with them. Trouble is, they seem so damn attractive at the time.” (No. 797.)

What makes you, as a grammarian, angry? Email jbarg@philadelphiaweekly.com, and we’ll chronicle your responses in a couple weeks. Who needs a website?

Apostrophe Apoplexy

British news and humor mag Private Eye, to its credit, has found a brilliant way to get back at all the angry grammarians among its readers. The magazine has been deluged with letters from people upset about the wandering apostrophe in the “Pedants’ Corner” section.

Some say it should be ’s, some say it should be s’, and some think there should be no apostrophe at all.

So what did the editor rename the section? “Pedan’ts Corner,” naturally.